ON THE GIRLS’ SIDE.
NE morning in autumn we left Winnipeg by a C.P.R. train to Morden with the avowed intention of visiting the Mennonites of that section, getting acquainted with them and seeing their community life from the inside.
On arriving in Morden we were somewhat at a loss to find ourselves far away from the typical Mennonite village to which we had been recommended by a young teacher in a “new-Canadian” school in another part of the Province. When we had asked her about the Mennonites, their habits and customs, she had told us as much as she knew of their quaint ways and at the end added: “They have their faults no doubt, and many of their customs are strange, but I shall never forget how kind they were to us children when our mother died.”
I had treasured this in my memory because if these people were a people ready to be good to children, I had no doubt but they would show the same milk of human kindness toward—visitors.
In Morden, the mayor kindly lent us a time-yellowed chart of “The Old Mennonite Reserve”, and steering by this we left Morden in the early afternoon on a branch line of railroad running south. It was an obliging sort of coach-train and set us down some six miles out of town at a grain elevator. The boys “running” the elevator got out their Ford and drove us over to Ostervick, which was our destination. Thus the day, begun in Winnipeg, found us in the late afternoon driving down a tree-lined Mennonite village street, with the prairie-wind scattering golden, autumn leaves in the car and under our wheels.
The Mennonite village here is the most perfect bit of camouflage in the world. It is located in a wood and as no house is visible it differs in no respect from any of the bluffs in sight, until you come right upon it. Even in the wood the houses are all set back from the street and a little tree-lined lane leads into the yards. Nothing can surpass the privacy thus obtained for each family. We turned in at the lane leading to David de Fehr’s house and when we presented the teacher’s letter of introduction, David and his wife laughed at our venture, looked us over, looked at each other, and agreed to take us in. This, briefly, was the manner of our reception into a Mennonite home with the opportunity of seeing at close quarters the life in a Mennonite village on the “Old Reserve”.
I think the first surprise came to us, after the idyllic situation of the village, in the large, substantial houses. Most of them were painted, usually white, all having Dutch shutters painted a Delft-blue.
Most of the houses are long, one-storey affairs with shingled roofs and are not unlike “Cape Cod houses” of the early type. The de Fehr home was a new, two-storey cottage with the characteristic Dutch shutters at the downstairs windows. It joined the barn by a separate room where water is pumped up for the stock in the winter. We visited a number of houses, drove through other villages and were at Morden and Winkler, but I saw only one house that might be said to be in the barn, after the manner of the old-time farm-houses in France, although more or less all appeared to be connected with the barn so that you could step out of one into the other without going out-of-doors. At Mr. de Fehr’s a fair white door led into the barn from a room with pumpkin-yellow floors which looked as if they had just been painted—as they look down in Quebec. There were, by way of furniture in the room, which might be called the winter-kitchen, two lounges, a table, two or three chairs, and a rocker in which David de Fehr sat to read his mail, including the different newspapers to which he subscribes.